Dark Secrets

I think I have too many kids.

Oh, not that I don't love them more than both my arms and legs, or the entire universe for that matter. And it's not that I don't have the ability to meet their basic needs (though that might be debatable—once I arrived at a grocery store to discover that my daughter was wearing only one shoe. You'd think a mother would notice those things.)

I'm talking about more in the sense that a brain can only hold so much information, and once you reach, oh say, two or three kids, a dog, a cat, and a husband there isn't room for much else.

You start incurring errors.

Weeks after I had Kaden, our fourth bundle of heart-expanding joy, I sensed this might be a problem. One evening after I'd been watching TV snuggled up to TDH (tall, dark and handsome) for an hour or so, I shot off the couch.

You know that shock of alarm when you realize you left the oatmeal on high and now the pot is boiling over as you race to flip the burner off? Only I was racing for the driveway where my precious infant was snoozing away in the backseat of the car.

It wasn't the only occurrence.

During soccer season this year, I dropped Kaden off at practice and his ten-year-old brother stayed to help. I jetted directly to a parent meeting for my oldest son's wrestling program. All day I meant to call TDH and ask him to pick our youngest up from soccer . . . but spaced it.

It wasn't until I was driving up our hill twenty minutes after soccer ended that the boiling pot flooded my mind.

My cell was dead, so with no way to call the coach or my hubby, I hyperventilated through all the horrible scenarios that could have happened to my son. Though the rational part of my brain knew the coach would not look at my child and say, "Huh, your mom should have been here by now. Why don't you go wait over by the sidewalk and watch for her," as he hopped in his SUVand drove off.

But what can I say? I'm a writer, I live in the paralyzing world of what if?

I walked into the house, looked at my husband and like an idiot said, "Is Kaden here?" Okay, hindsight and all that. You don't drop an, "I don't know where our seven-year-old is" bomb on your husband without prefacing it with some details.

I briefly tried to explain, but all I saw was the back of TDH's head as he raced out the door, jumped in his pickup and with tires squealing, flew at mock 60 down our hill. I got on the phone but couldn't reach the coach. Finally reached another soccer mom who was still waiting at the field for her other son and hadn't even noticed how late it was or the fact that I wasn't there yet.

I sank onto the couch, relief flooding endorphins through my body and told her how I had started to panic about never seeing Kaden again. She interrupted and said, "And Logan."

I drew a blank. And then said, "Oh, yeah. That son too."

See what I mean?

When Your Kids Tell You . . .

. . . that you need to be more firm in your discipline, you know things are way off track.

As my oldest son and I strolled hand-in-hand through the store (yes, my twelve-year-old still likes to hang with his mom), he casually mentioned that I needed to be a stricter disciplinarian.

This isn't the first time he's mentioned this. And he did follow that comment up by saying, "I'm probably going to regret telling you that." And I believe he is in fact regretting it this very moment as he sits in his room grounded, but that's a story for another post.

So I've been pondering his words and have come to a realization.

When the kids were little, I was pretty reactive and easily frustrated (though in my meager defense I had three toddlers running around and a mountain of dirty clothes creeping from the laundry room—when the mountain comes to Mohammed . . .)

So I was exhausted and short tempered and my husband worked six days a week.

And I was a perfectionistic controller. Yeah, you see the volcano brewing, don't you? Exhaustion and the need for control and order are the main ingredients for spontaneous combustion. And I combusted on a frequent basis.

Added to this, I hadn't been raised around small children, so didn't understand how to discipline and had no one to learn from. The net result is that the consequences I implemented were often too strict for the offense. Which is something I truly regret.

Fast forward through years of growing and learning and seeing myself through a more accurate (though grace-filled) lens and I find that I'm now an uncertain mother.

I throw a potential consequence out there, like say, "If you choose not to change your attitude, then you won't be going to the party," and then second guess myself. Is it too strict? Is it fair? And when my child continues on his course of disaster, rather than give the consequence I just keep reminding him of it, hoping desperately that he'll toe the line and get to go to the party.

Or I'll threaten unreasonably steep consequences that I don't really mean, assuming that'll motivate them to get themselves under control. Like that ever works. And then I undermine my own parenting when I back pedal.

So when my son told me that I threaten and threaten and threaten with no follow through, I realized he was absolutely right.

Parenting isn't about doing it perfectly, but it is in great part about being consistent.

So I'm much more thoughtful about what comes out of my mouth. I first think through whether it's a consequence I'm willing to uphold. If I am, then I am fairly certain it's reasonable.

And heaven knows that when it comes to parents and kids, someone has to be reasonable.

Boundaries

Have you ever noticed that some people don't know where they end and others begin?

They feel the need to take charge of your life and try to live it for you, or at the very least urge you to live it the way they would.

In-laws often get the bad rap for this, but I think many struggle with not knowing when to stay quiet, when to tone down the body language, when to let go.

As parents especially, we can struggle with over-protective love.

We see the train wreck coming if our children stay right in the middle of the tracks. We tell ourselves that it's really in their best interest that we speak up.

But isn't it really about us?

About our need for their lives to reflect our values, our desperate need to keep them from the pain of their choices.

But is it their pain or our own pain that we wrestle with?

If we don't see others or our children as their own, self-contained entities we'll continually cross out of the space that is ours and into the space that is theirs.

One parenting class I took referred to it as our "space bubble."

When we cross into their space bubble, in a sense we are tying their hands and keeping them from priceless treasure—learning from the error of their ways.

Lessons learned are like gold nuggets we accumulate across a lifetime.

When we save our kids from themselves, we steal their gold. And sadly, keep them on the very path we are trying to save them from.

Each day they get older the price gets higher.

Much better to release them into the hands of the One who yearns to deposit much gold into their (and our) lives.